Inside Pages

Us news types get awfully worked up about election night. The newsroom becomes awash in planning memos, late-arriving stories, staffing adjustments and enough pizza to see you through Armageddon.

No one goes hungry in a newsroom for #BftCoElections.twitpic.com/baytft

Why would newspapers even want to endorse political candidates, Edward Morrissey asks in a a column on The Week’s website. And just to be sure you know exactly where Morrissey stands on this question, the emphatic headline “Why newspaper endorsements don’t matter” clears the matter. So does his characterization of newspaper endorsement editorials as “anachronisms.”

My list of recommendations to anyone seeking to follow election coverage online begins with The Island Packet and The Beaufort Gazette’s election page, particularly if you’re interested in local campaigns. I’m confident that our rundown of contested county races is the most comprehensive around. It includes questionnaire responses and editorial board interviews with candidates who agreed to them (which is all but a handful), and it will provide convenient links to stories and editorial endorsements as they are written.

The reader on the other end of the phone line demanded an explanation: Why, on the eve of arguments in one of the more substantial cases to be argued in front of the U.S. Supreme Court this session, had The Island Packet not mentioned Fisher v. University of Texas?

She then rattled off to me details about the case and a brief history of Supreme Court rulings as they pertain to affirmative action, which, to her apparent satisfaction, the court seems poised to pare back.

Explaining to a job candidate during a recent interview that our news editors once worried about unleashing reporters on the Twitter-verse, I noted that The Island Packet and The Beaufort Gazette had suffered few, if any, instances of off-color, inappropriate or blatantly biased tweets.

Even back in the days when newspaper companies boasted profit margins of 30 percent or better — and that was in the past decade, believe it or not — a sense of pending doom permeated like a thick fog.

Yep, we've been aware for quite some time that competition for online audience equated to competition for advertising and marketing dollars and that change was in store whether we liked it or not.

The author of a recent letter to the editor took the newspaper to task for displaying crime news too prominently. This is a resort area, and such news could be bad for business, she argued.

That’s certainly possible, and her criticism is not an uncommon refrain. However, crime itself is worse for business, and accurate reports about it empower people to respond accordingly (though I concede there is no guarantee that they will.)

First, let’s get the obvious joke out of our system, shall we: “Journalism ethics” is an oxymoron, much like “military intelligence” or “honest lawyer.” ... That’s it. Go ahead. Laugh it up.

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If the milk from your breakfast cereal has stopped squirting from your nose, we will proceed.

The tipster presumably leaked the Portland Oregonian newspaper’s internal memo about digital strategy because he or she deemed it outrageous. That’s typically why people leak information about the companies for which they work, after all.

But in this case, I found the leak more inspiring than shocking.

The Bismark (N.D.) Tribune announced yesterday that it is making a radical change to its online commenting policy.

A letter from publisher Brian Kroshus stated in part: